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Develop these four habits to help take your landscape photography to the next level

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There are a lot of tips and advice out there for all kinds of different genres of photography. Most of them involve technique or buying more gear. Very little is about our behaviour and mindset. This video from Mark Denney, though, is a little different. In it, he presents four habits he’s developed over the last few years that have helped him with his workflow to improve his landscape photography.

While Mark freely admits that everybody’s workflow is different and not every tip is going to help everybody, these are some great suggestions. I follow a couple of these myself and they’ve made a big difference to my photography over the years. Maybe they’ll help yours, too.

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10 tips to help you get sharp photos when shooting handheld

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Getting sharp photos when shooting handheld is probably the biggest struggle for new photographers – especially if they haven’t figured out how exposure and shutter speed works yet. Even if you know what you’re doing with exposure, though, it can still be a little tricky sometimes. And with as tiny as camera LCDs are, it can be difficult to spot until you get back home and look at them full-screen on your computer.

So, how can you help to guarantee you get sharper photos? Well, photographer James Popsys is here with a bunch of tips to help you figure that out. Not all of them may apply to you – particularly the first one if you don’t drink coffee – but between them, with a little practise, you should be able to start seeing sharper images in no time.

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The real difference between flash and Natural Light

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Many photographers often like to pick between flash or natural light. For some reason, they avoid mixing the two. It actually goes to the extent that some photographers will declare themselves as either a natural light or an artificial light photographer. It almost seems like these two are separate worlds that have little in common. Yet, how different is a flash from natural light after all? Isn’t light just light no matter the source? Let’s find out.

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Being Mr. Green

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I get a lot of emails from people asking how I manage to bring in so many new clients as well as keeping the ones I have to build my business.

One thing that I wanted to share here is the basics of how you might view winning a client and the actual reality of things from the client’s perspective.

To be successful, you need to be able to give your clients what they want; you may perceive that to be a set of amazing images. However, just doing that is not going to get you across the line. You are a professional photographer, so it’s your job to produce high-quality photography, it’s not your selling point…

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How to make and light believable fake rain for photographers and filmmakers

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One of the most often faked weather phenomena in photography and filmmaking is rain. But it’s not always as easy as one might think. Raindrops are notoriously difficult to film or photograph, making even real rain very challenging to shoot.

To fake it, it’s even more difficult, and you often have to create near hurricane levels of water to have it appear convincing to the camera as actual rain. In this video, Valentina from Aputure’s A-Team shows us how to create fake rain on-set that’s easy to make and very believable.

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How to get a good natural light look when using flash outdoors

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I’m always asked why I use flash outdoors and the answer is quite simple. The natural light doesn’t always give me what I want. Sometimes I want to complement or augment it and sometimes I want to override it completely. There’s nothing wrong with natural light and I use that too when it looks good, but yeah… It just doesn’t always look the way I want it to.

But how can you work with flash outdoors and still have it look natural when shooting things like weddings or portraits? Well, in this video from Vanessa Joy, we look at several different ways you can light a subject with flash, balancing it with the natural light to create a natural look. And, yes, there’s more to it than simply adjusting the power level to even out the brightness.

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Hard vs soft light – 5 portrait lighting setups broken down to show you when to use each

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When shooting portraits, the difference between hard and soft light on your subject makes a massive difference to the final result. There are so many ways we can use both, and when it comes to photographing people, the challenges of hard light can be particularly tricky to work around. But knowing when to use each allows you to make better creative decisions.

In this video, John Gress walks us through five different lighting setups using both hard and soft light to see how they come together and how the different quality of the light affects your subject and how it makes the final image look. You may even want to mix the two from time to time.

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Eight of the most common macro photography mistakes and how to avoid them

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Macro can be a tricky subject, especially if you want to be able to do it well. Chances are, most of us who’ve tried to have a go at macro have made some or all of mistakes at some point. Some of us spot them as soon as we’ve made them and figure out how to work around them. But those mistakes are not always so obvious.

I’ve certainly made a few macro mistakes over the years, where images haven’t turned out exactly the way I wanted, but wasn’t sure why. In this video, macro photographer Micael Widell shows us the eight most common beginner mistakes he sees in macro photography and how you can avoid them.

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10 astrophotography tips to raise your nighttime photography game

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Astrophotography is arguably one of the more technically challenging genres of photography out there. And even if you do know what you’re doing, it can be tricky if you can’t easily see what you’re doing. And if you’re new to it all, it’s especially difficult.

In this video, Trevor Jones at AstroBackyard gives us his top 10 tips for shooting astrophotography and answers a lot of questions you may have about gear and technique. Trevor also covers some of the logistical aspects of astrophotography, too, including powering your cameras for long periods of time in the cold dark night.

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How to fake that gelled split lighting look in Photoshop

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Using multiple differently coloured gels to light your subject and their environment has become a very popular subject over the last few years – and I’m totally not blaming Jake Hicks – but it’s not always possible to easily do in the studio. Perhaps you don’t have the colours of gel that you need. Or maybe there’s just too much colour spill to effectively get what you’re after.

It is possible to simulate the look of using coloured gels in post, though, thanks to Photoshop. And in this video, Unmesh at PiXimperfect shows us how. There are several ways you can do this, but the method Unmesh shows in the video is very effective and covers a bunch of different techniques that you can apply to a lot of other tasks, too.

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